Blizzard, Please admit that in order to make your voice chat work that you took a short cut and only allowed a software driver for sound. Please revert this change and put off voice chat and allow us to use hardware acceleration again. My sound is terrible now and I can't hear half the sounds I used to. I've got through the trouble shooting and it's still terrible. I hate the way this game sounds now.

Voice chat and the new sound engine actually aren't linked, or dependant on each other. Yes of course the new sound engine is used to run voice chat, but the sound engine upgrades have been in the making long before voice chat. Once it came time to begin implementing voice chat it really wouldn't have been much different regardless of the engine we use.

We do understand that the switch to the new sound engine has caused some issues. Any undertaking and replacement of such a large system within the game, and especially with so many and varied machines running it, there are sure to be some growing pains.

The new sound engine allows so many additional and great sound features for all of our players, including the ability for us to do new and interesting sound alterations based on in-game queues and actions, that it would really be a step backwards to go back to the old system.

We definitely understand there are issues, and we're committed to working through them and bringing the current sound engine on-par with the previous one, and then completely surpassing it.

We've identified some performance bottlenecks in Patch 2.2.0 that are non hardware specific (Windows, Mac, integrated sound, discrete sound, doesn't matter). Please keep your eye out for an upcoming PTR cycle, where you can try the next update, targeted at addressing many of the in-game lag issues that have been reported.